Hello I’m Nadine from Affordable Staff I’m here with Victor from Blackk Finance and just doing a case study interview to talk about his experience in working with Affordable Staff.
Why did you decide to outsource?
Hello I’m Nadine from Affordable Staff I’m here with Victor from Blackk Finance and just doing a case study interview to talk about his experience in working with Affordable Staff.
Hey Victor! Hi Nadine, how are you pretty well thank you. Let’s get into it why did you decide to outsource um so it was a few years ago and we decided we really wanted to grow we thought there was a really good opportunity there to help more clients and more customers and we felt that the mortgage broking industry was getting more complicated with a lot more requirements in the whole loan process and so we looked at that and we went well how are we going to given the opportunity and the situation how he saw it was going um and how banks were behaving we thought what are we going to do to you know grow our business and the best way that we saw that all the opportunities was is by improving our staff and getting more staff and going overseas I’d spoken a couple of brokers who were using outsourcing or using staff overseas and so one of those in particular is working with affordable staff and she really recommended them very highly and so we you know did a call based upon that okay great um so did that actually flow into having more seats in your office because you utilized outsourced stuff yeah it was so at the time we were looking at changing from having one office in Brisbane to one of the gold coast and also one in Brisbane and we were like looking at and going well how are we going to where we’re going to put our people you know where will they sit all that sort of stuff and it made sense to at that point to have someone who you know try someone who was overseas and then that way then we could you know use them whichever office we’re in and you know that’s yeah that was that’s what led us to it.
Fantastic
Why is trust an important factor?
Why do you think that trust is such an important factor in outsourcing?
Well I think because of the whole loan process trust is key to everything so clients trust you or they don’t trust you to do the whole loan application the whole data security is really important you’ve got clients identification their income you know potentially passwords all their id and stuff so it’s really key and the next thing is you know a big part of this is trusting them to get the loan processed accurately so it gives it the highest chance of being approved and having you know making sure that their data and security is secure and it’s there so you know trust is really key in the whole process fantastic so why did you choose affordable stuff so we had a look at a few different options the reason why we chose affordable staff was due to a couple of reasons firstly because I had someone who I knew who had used them really well and she spoke very highly of them and the second reason was because they specialized with connected brokers so I wanted someone like it wasn’t only just about hiring somebody it was also about making sure that that process and that person worked and it worked and it fitted in well and I felt like when I talked to affordable staff you know they had a lot of brokers who dealt with connective they had a lot of brokers um they knew that system really well like the whole mercury system and they also did a lot of training with their people about using the system and they had trained them before we hired them on how to use mercury and so that was really key I was like well it’s all good to have a person hiring a person but it’s more important about how productive they’re going to be that they know that system and also that they’ve got someone who they can go and talk to that’s not just me if they have a problem so there’s a lot of team leaders and training and what sort of stuff and that was really important for our decision yeah we’ve actually um switched over our training now to the nexus as well as mercury fives yeah of course yeah make sure we’re backing it up from either side because some breakers are still using mercury five.
Do you think that outsourcing is taking away jobs from Australia?
Do you think that outsourcing is taking jobs away from Australia?
I mean I think that there’s a way that you could view that outsourcing is taking jobs away from Australia a little bit in in our in practice what I found is that usually when i hired staff usually maybe at around three to six months after they’d started I noticed that there were there was a chunk of the work that they did that they found was boring and repetitious yeah so stuff to do with pricing ordering valuations etc. you know data entry and I found that their enthusiasm between those jobs sort of waned at that time and the second part of it at all is if you have a look at the whole loan process we found we believe that there were some parts of it that were really key although it’s all very important there’s some parts of it that a client doesn’t really see and doesn’t really notice unless it goes wrong but there’s some parts of it which is really important and which can really help a client make a big difference to them so what we did was we decided to try and separate the bits that could be done by someone who wasn’t necessarily sitting in the same office and that would allow us to give our staff who were based in our office more time and more resources being able to keep our clients up to date and do the stuff that was more relevant to the clients and delivered a better service to them yeah okay so in not doing that repetitive time consuming beginning admin part of the pipeline your local staff have actually been able to deliver a stronger service to your clients, yeah we could do more we thought more than about the process of what the clients wants to see what they want to know and then we can we got more time to do that you only got a limited amount of time from any person yeah and if you can you know separate a chunk of it off and then get it handled elsewhere then that allows you to focus more on this this section better. Okay, fantastic!
How have your local team found working with the offshore team?
How are your local team in working with offshore staff?
So they really enjoy it in our situation we hired our offshore staff prior to having the person who works for us locally yeah um so it would have probably made it a little bit easier culturally because when they came on board and when we hired them from the day one they already had people who were you know who had been working for us for you know a few months or a year earlier and so they already they just fitted in and they you know led their thing they also didn’t come from a finance background as well so we had to train them on what we wanted done and how it worked and it’s worked really well at the moment they have been always found work really well as their basically a liaison between the clients and me and also the our affordable staff in the Philippines and what they do is they can they manage the whole process and they can see what needs to be done and then they can answer the questions for the guys that work in the Philippines and also get stuff from clients and then make sure everything goes pretty well so yeah so it’s actually enabled you guys to have your local team culture sync in really quickly with your outsourced team as a part of that team as well yeah we have a couple of meetings each week where they we have a group you know phone call or a video call and that works really well and we you know we talk about our weekends and you know stuff that’s going on everyone’s lives to try and make it fun and get everyone so that everyone knows you know everybody comes different cultures and stuff but there’s still a lot of things that you know are common between the team. Yeah okay.
What has outsourcing enabled you to do that you didn’t think you’d be able to before?
What has outsourcing enabled you to do that you didn’t think you would be able to?
So it’s really really improved our process I probably wasn’t aware when we started this how much of an improvement how this would drive the improvement in our process for years I’ve been wanting to look at going well how do we improve our process because I felt that having a better process was a really big key for us to be able to do more business and write more business and grow.
The aspect of that was that by having when we had people who are overseas it forced us to go well okay how are they going to know what to do all right and what is the best way for us to communicate that of what’s got to do and what’s going to happen in what order and so whereas in Australia it’s too easy to be able to tell someone who’s next to you what’s going on you can’t do that so much when they’re you know in a different country so it definitely improved our process and that was a really big part like the whole using affordable stuff they helped just to develop that process because they had used with other brokers and we’d seen what worked yeah and we when we invested the time with that it just made a big difference the second thing was is it improved our service delivery to our clients like it shortened a lot of the whole you know some sections of the whole loan process and improve the accuracy and the last thing was is it helped us grow our volume probably by at least 60 percent you know so I when I initially started that was probably the end goal I didn’t think it would make so much difference so early on in the whole thing to that I thought was something that might come a bit later on yeah but it was fairly quickly impacting your timeline huge difference yeah lots of differences.
What measurable results have you found?
What measurable results have you found from since you started outsourcing?
Before we outsourced our turnaround times for an application like once we had our clients all of their paperwork was somewhere usually between four and seven days from there you know approximately for a loan application to be ready by having the uh the team overseas that’s cut down to somewhere between usually two and three days um and that’s massive so it allows us to have a lot more quicker from when the client send us the information we then book a meeting we’re meeting with them getting their stuff getting it signed getting it submitted so it shortened the start of the whole process in terms of getting it submitted it’s everything sooner the next part about it is the accuracy as well so what we’re finding now is that you know 70 approximately of our deals will either get approved on the first like you know we’ll go straight through approved or alternatively they might come back with one to two items that they’re missing or they want to clarify or check and so having people who focus on that a lot and who specialize in that and given the personality type that they are very thorough and that makes a big difference in getting everything ready my detail is not my thing you know I’m more of a salesperson a bit of a journalist and talk you know talking about things and planning things and just having all those details better down makes a big difference to getting it approved and that cuts down the time frame you know with everything and it also cuts down the phone calls and improves the quality of our submissions so makes a big difference all around yeah it does we found that it makes a really huge impact actually on putting the right person into the right role 100 and you know in doing that it actually buys more time for the broker to do what their skill set is you know sales and customer service yeah I mean we did the personality test we early on from this and you know when I was reading the results on me I was like that’s pretty correct you know and when you know the people who um I was remember reading the profiles of the people who worked and started working for us and that was true as well and they’ve been really helpful you know it works you know well together they’ve obviously got different skills to me and it’s been great as a teamwork thing. Fantastic!
What advice would you give to others who are looking to outsource?
What advice would you give to another person looking to outsource?
Yeah so I understand I mean people the big thing for mortgage brokers is that you know the big thing is like was the cost you know so it’s like oh if I’m going to have a person what’s the cost going to be am I ready I think really you’ve got to be hiring someone two to three months in advance when you think you need them yeah um because there’s a certain element of what we do which is you know sure you can do you know I can do data entry right I can put a person’s date of birth in and all sorts of stuff but should you be doing it and are you adding value to your client if you’re doing it so the first thing is you probably need to be doing it earlier than what you think and then the next part about that is I think that in time you won’t see the results straight away but then you need to be developing what’s going to be a really good process and a really good just flow from a deal point of view with you with your staff and you and you’ve got to get that starting to work on a smaller basis before you can start to ramp it up you know so there’s no point just throwing 10 deals at someone who’s new and going okay here you go handle all of these packages and you know I’ll sell the other end so you’re better off doing one or two at a time working with them more intensively getting that starting to process and getting that thing and then you’ll get the scale you know a few months later or a short time later because it frees up your time and then you can do more stuff that’s going to help like you get a better service which the clients are happier they’re more likely to refer etc. yeah so definitely do it before you think you need it and use it to develop and improve your processes yeah it’s nice and strong because you have to and then you know you as you go through it you’ll go oh that’s not it’s not working and if you know the team that we’ve had been awesome at going okay let’s talk about it what went wrong or we could do better and then changing it and then adding it to the process and then doing it differently and it’s um yeah so this is Nadine from affordable staff I’ve just finished a case study interview with Victor Kalinowski from Blackk Finance this is Nadine from Affordable Staff where there’s a better way to outsource. Thank you!
